


Marginalia

by ella_minnow



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-16
Updated: 2012-06-16
Packaged: 2017-11-07 21:35:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/435695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ella_minnow/pseuds/ella_minnow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It starts as a flicker of movement at the corner of Billy's eye. When he turns to look, he finds himself alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Marginalia

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at [lmno @ livejournal](http://ella-minnow.livejournal.com/43711.html#cutid1) on 25/05/2004. A remix of shirasade's [Book Lore](http://pr0nandchocolate.net/fiction/book-lore/).

It starts as a flicker of movement at the corner of Billy's eye. When he turns to look, he finds himself alone.

(Or as alone as one can be at the centre of a busy movie set.)

As a pair of orcs shuffle by, the one complaining to the other in a broad Kiwi accent that the makeup is staining her skin a mottled blue-grey, Billy convinces himself he's imagining things. Turning his attention back to the novel in his hands, he finishes his page, rips it out, and flicks it into the garbage can at his elbow.

*

For as long as he can remember, Billy has loved books. Even before he learned to read, he had loved the smell of books and the look of them on shelves and the feel of them in his hands. He had loved the rasp of paper against his skin. He had even loved the sharp bite of the paper cuts when he ran his fingertips along the edges of the pages.

*

When it happens again--and again and again--it becomes impossible for Billy to convince himself that the movement in his peripheral vision is a product of his imagination. There's a limit to his capacity for self-deception.

So he gets used to the phantoms that flit through the edges of his vision.

(The heat of a New Zealand summer, combined with Pippin's woollen cape and scarf, makes it difficult to muster up a good nervous chill, anyway. There's only so often that he can break out in a cold sweat and he's tired of fingerprint-shaped smudges where words have been rubbed away by his anxious grip. He's tired of black ink on his finger tips and the scolding of the makeup ladies who have to scrub it away.)

He never quite manages to get used to the feeling of the hair on the back of his neck standing on end, though.

*

When he was working as a printer, Billy found that he liked books even better when they lay before him in unassembled little piles of paper and glue. He liked the vulnerability of the individual pages, helpless without the protection of numbers and binding. He liked the idea of thousands upon thousands of books going out into the world, covered in his fingerprints and, occasionally, faint drops of blood from the paper cuts he'd never quite learned to avoid.

*

It's almost two weeks before Billy finally turns fast enough to catch a split-second glimpse of his ghost. He wonders, as he watches Dom slip quickly through the usual on-set crowd of monsters and harried-looking crew members, why he isn't surprised.

(He doesn't know why he's shaking, though, or why his fingers are sweaty, slipping against the slick cover of the paperback in his hands.)

He's not surprised at all.

*

Later, long after he'd left printing behind, Billy tried to recreate the feeling of shifting through the literal pieces of a story on unbound pages, but it was never the same. Starting with a bound book and ripping the pages out as he went wasn't the same. It was the difference between submission and destruction.

*

Dom moves too much to be a very good stalker.

(The only time he's really still is when he's in character--Merry is far less prone to fidgeting--or when he's wound pretzel-like into upward facing duck or whatever those yoga poses are called.)

Billy pretends not to notice him, though, pretends that his attention is entirely held by the book in his hands. He isn't playing hard to get; he's very carefully seducing Dom. Billy wants Dom to come to him. He wants to make the second move, not the first.

Of course, this particular brand of seduction only works if Dom is still watching and, one day, he isn't anymore.

Which is a particularly frustrating turn of events.

*

Billy was a little bit bitter, really, that his brief stint as a printer ruined--

No. Ruined was too strong a word.

He was bitter that being a printer changed reading for him, and not for the better. He couldn't lose himself in the pages of properly bound books. They were too strong, too defensive. He couldn't crack them open and trail his fingers over their vulnerable edges.

He couldn't read anymore. He could only skim.

*

Billy hates to abandon perfectly good plans, but in this case, he doesn't really have much of a choice. Dom refuses to look up from his book (and when did he become the avid reader?), so the subtle approach is somewhat lost on him.

Perhaps something a little more direct is called for.

Dom jumps when Billy pulls the book from his hand (The Silmarillion, which lands with a squelch in an inconveniently placed puddle when Billy tosses the book over his shoulder). There might be a protest in Dom's eyes as Billy wraps his fingers over Dom's hands and pulls them down and out of the way. There might be a protest on Dom's lips as Billy steps in to the curve of Dom's body.

There is definitely something vulnerable in the way that Dom begins to shake beneath Billy's hands and in the wedge of soft skin over his hipbone, revealed when Dom's shirt hikes up a little, and in the teeth just barely visible between his slightly parted lips.

(His breathing is uneven and Billy hasn't even done anything yet.)

Billy smiles and strokes the fluttering pulse beneath his thumb and decides that he would like to send Dom out into the world wearing his smudged fingerprints.

 

End.


End file.
